Tuesday in Toronto

The news is different in Canada.
On this day in 1969, Neil Armstrong took one small step for (a) man, one giant step for mankind.

The new iPods are here! The new iPods are here! They’re $100 cheaper, feature an iPod-like mini user interface, 12-hour battery life, and a new front page shuffle command. But where are the 60GB editions?

Google should reveal the opening price in its Initial Public Offering (IPO) this week. The stock will be sold in an unusual dutch auction format which will give all investors a shot at owning the hottest new issue since Netscape.

British Telecom is blocking child porn. BT claims their filter is stopping 23,000 clicks a day in the UK. (!)

Free music downloads via Napster are back in some colleges. Only this time they’re legal. In an effort to fight illegal downloads, and to keep from being sued by the RIAA, George Washington University and others are licensing Napster for the entire student body. But Duke tops them all. The entire incoming freshman class will receive iPods. What’s next, free toasters for signing up for freshman English? Maybe they’ll use the iPods to keep track of free wireless hotspots.

The Chicago Tribune, which hasn’t missed an issue since the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, crashed yesterday. A software glitch left 40% of subscribers newspaperless. The rest got truncated editions with weird page numbering and washed out colors. The publisher says it will cost “under $1 million” to fix the problem.

According to the LA Times, students are turning away from computer science classes just when the Labor Department says job opportunities are exploding. Student enrollment is down 41% at UC Berkeley, for instance, while the Labor Department predicts a 46% increase in jobs over the next eight years.

The only thing increasing in the computer job market is the percentage of jobs outsourced to other countries. Victor Kiam was correct when he said that “someday we will be a country of people selling life insurance to each other”

The comment by grey is right on: those going to college are seeking careers,and they see entry level jobs in the field going oversees, so where would they start? If they stay in college to get more degrees behind their names so that they can enter the IT field at a higher level, THOSE jobs at the higher level may be gone to India before they graduate.
Wisdom tells the prospective IT students to go for MBAs, become the decision makers in business, not those whose jobs are decided by “competitive and economic factors” to be expendable. I hadn’t heard the Kiam quote before, but I certainly can see what he meant.

I agree with Ken. What I.T. job boom? I’m an out of work Desktop Support Technician for the last year.
I have not seen a big pickup in any of the job markets as of yet. I hope it will come very soon. Tomorrow would be great!

The quality of L.A. Times reporting has been sliding since the Tribune takeover. The ‘reporter’ probably has been talking to HR flacks or CEOs who benefit from continually expanding the labor pool, in order to skim an ever decreasing fraction of it. Doug is correct – U.S. companies are mortgaging their future by reducing entry level or lateral transfer opportunities. We need more newbie MBAs with no experience or demonstrated leadership abilities – WRONG.

It is rather difficult to get into CS at Cal if you weren’t initially accepted into the College of Engineering, not to mention extremely competitive (I quit after I encountered too many people stealing textbooks and readers as well as sabotaging other people’s projects).
There’s a growing interest in cognitive science, though, among disgruntled former intended CS students – the cognitive science program recently became impacted. One of the five concentrations in cog sci at Cal is computational modeling, and the major itself requires classes in CS, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and biology (specifically neuroscience).
Then again, some of us end up in sociology, trying to understand what motivates competitive undergraduates to act like such incredible jerks to one another.. =P

Sure jobs are ‘exploding’ jyd. In retail, food services and other low paying areas. Sure its still tough to get into college, the majority of students are from foriegn countries and will go home upon graduation.
Problem with the news services these days it that there are too few controlling bodies running them. If I’m not mistaken most all the radio stations are controlled by 3 or 4 organizations. Its really getting kind of scary.

Leo,
The new iPods are not cheaper – their bundling is cheaper. Which is ok. For the $100 less you don’t get a case or a remote on the 40gb for example. So you save $100 unless you wanted them in the first place 🙂
This does allow you to spend the case money on a third party case though, which is cool.

Jobs are on the rise kids.. Plenty to be had. The “global economy” is becoming a reality, so if you want to develop webpages and live in your same house in the same town, you might be out of luck, but there ARE jobs. Some more desirable than others, for sure. IT jobs will stop being outsourced soon. Want proof? How many people use windows? AOL? Are those the best programs or just the easiest? so the less tech savvy individuals, don’t want to speak to someone with some God-awful accent.

“Labor Department says job opportunities are exploding”. They didn’t specify where the job opportunities are exploding (India, China, Russia, etc). Or perhaps they meant the opportunities have exploded. Or perhaps they simply got confused and thought they were talking about all those WMD’s in Iraq.
Forget about advanced degrees in CS. Go to your local state supported university and drop in on a few graduate CS classes, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see which way the wind blows.